Coming Soon Pages 101: Their Importance and Main Tasks

When you think of a coming soon page what picture does immediately have appear in your mind? Well, it depends. If you started to browse the internet in 2000s then most likely you’ll have a picture of a “working man” with an orange cone near it on a white background, and a headline saying “Under Construction”, but well, if you’re somewhat new to the internet you will more familiar with those usual pages who either have a countdown timer or a subscribe form to be informed when the website launches its full version, sometimes your eyes will be pleased by very interesting concepts with great user interfaces, but even then you’ll have to face a time or a form, because that’s the owner’s main aim – to let you know as soon as possible when their product launches. This is only one of the many points we will be discussing in details in this article.

So to break it down to the simplest form, a coming soon page is a page your visitor will visit before the main site will be launched, so we could classify a coming soon page as a “destination page” or landing page.

Must-Have Points for a Coming Soon Page

There are several points which must be taken in consideration while designing coming soon pages. I will try to explain it both, from the standpoint of a designer and a simple site visitor.

Be Intuitive & Explicit

The first point which must be taken in consideration when designing Coming Soon pages is how well you explain people what your upcoming website is going to be about. Is it going to be a Product, a Service, or maybe a Magazine? How does one find out about this without proper explanation from the one who knows it best – you! The best way to sort this out would be a few lines explaining it, but there are also other ways of doing it:

Make good use of characters, icons and intuitive slogans. You’ve probably heard that a picture is worth a thousand words that is why if you think that there’s anything that represents your brand the best, make good use of it!

A common technique I’ve noticed lately, is using a rather short but very descriptive video in your page. The Guys at WunderKinder have always been good at what they’re doing, and promoting their products as well. Everytime there’s a product release approaching they are building awesome coming-soon pages with great videos witch are really catchy!

If you are planning to launch a marketplace or a site that will sell any digital goodies it’s great to offer your early visitors a freebie or goodie so that your visitors are getting comfortable with your product, or service.

Connect with Your Users

That’s right. Keeping in touch with your early visitors is very important. What if you haven’t explained the purpose of your upcoming site well enough and they have some questions or maybe some suggestions? You shouldn’t leave that apart and there are various ways you can actually keep in touch with your visitors/subscribers.

Social Media is probably the fastest and the easiest way to do that. It probably takes no more than a minute to write down a tweet and ask a question, and considering how well social networks are doing today, that’s definitely a point that mustn’t be omitted.

Contact Form. A contact form is another, more direct way of getting contacted by users. I think this one must be combined with the social media, just in case not everybody is on Twitter/Facebook or they have a more serious suggestion to make which can’t be done via social media which limits you (Twitter) to a specific number of characters, and makes your message not-so-private.

The actual newsletter. You can speak to your readers via the actual newsletter. It’s probably the best way to let your visitors know about the status of your project/website and keeping them up with updates.

Impress Them

It is very important to impress your visitors as soon as they visit your site. How do you do that? We’ve already told that we have to make them memorize your brand by using slogans, common characters and mascots, but what if you don’t have any? What if your logo is made of plain text which means nothing to them than a name, you have to create an impression in another way.

There are is a con and a pro when it comes to Coming Soon Pages. The pro would be the size and the space you’re “given” when designing a coming soon page, it’s pretty small so you don’t have to bother with dilemmas like “filling the whole space”, yet the con is the same. When it comes to it, it’s a little bit harder to make an impression because you are given less work-space compared to usual websites.

The only advice I can give you about creating a good first impression is using really high-quality graphics (as on the image above) and images that give them a hint about your service and product.

Beautiful Examples of Coming Soon Pages

Conclusion

As a final word for this article I wanted to say that all you have to do, is try to do your job as good as possible and keep in mind the habits your visitors might have. Impress them with the best UI graphics you can design, buy or hire someone do them for you and make everything intuitive.